What would George Valentin make of 21st century book publishing?

THE ARTIST is a widely hailed homage to a bygone era and an excellent film about the inexorable march of technology. Spanning a few crucial years in the transition from silent movies to the ‘talkies’, it’s a cautionary tale of the perils of being superseded by progress itself.

As well as a telling experiment in getting a 21st century audience to actually shut up in a cinema, the silences it creates in the pauses of its orchestral score have extraordinary emotional impact.

For me, the key sequence is the hero’s nightmare, in which this deafening silence is pierced by the objects and environment around him beginning to emit sound – the glass placed on the table, the wind rustling in the palm fronds and the giggles of the passing dancing girls. In the dream, poor George remains voiceless, and afterwards his waking self powerless, as the studio he exclusively works with (and is beholden to) begins a transition into the new era. He risks being left behind, protesting his importance as a creative – an artist – and not some vulgar industry talking puppet.

It’s probably crass to try and compare the advent of sound in cinema to the transition from print to digital ebooks – the innovations aren’t strictly correspondent. But there have been interesting resonances with the themes of THE ARTIST in the book world this week, not so much in the looking forward as the looking back.

Two videos-gone-viral sum this up well: ‘The Joy of Books’ prompted an outpouring along the lines of: ‘how wonderful – you can’t do that with ebooks’; ‘The Page Turner’ with its Heath Robinson contraption and Back to the Future-esque charm was so analogue it hurt and was similarly meticulous and charming in its execution.

THE ARTIST speaks to the same cosy, (in the hardback's case, pre-emptive) faux-nostalgia, writ large with a major studio and distribution deal - a word-of-mouth marketing dream, a wonderful novelty for our screens and a self-reflexive diversion from the onward march of digital filming technology and 3D.

Just like stop motion films of print books are delightful, this doesn’t cover for the fact that their actual, everyday form and function is being usurped much the same way as George Valentin. So it's no surprise that print books and hardbacks are now being bea(u)tified and ‘beautiful books’ are held up as beacons of a new vaunted hope. Print publishing is being disentangled from the mechanical processes of its production and elevated to the status of high art, replete with its holy artefacts and fetishized objects to literally be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

It makes sense that in this year, 2012, we seek these comforts in the dark days of January. The Waterstones #apostrophegate might have a PR function, it might be a necessary retroactive signal that the chain is embracing its traditional core values, but there’s no denying for many it’s a pleasant diversion to the question mark hanging over the chain’s forward (digital) planning.

There’s no better example of this deployment of deliberate distraction than the Leveson Inquiry, in which the media’s commentary about itself achieves some sort of meta-level zenith. It's really a glorious sideshow. Will Self nailed it last year when he described #hackgate as ‘epiphenomenal’: defined as ‘a secondary phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary phenomenon’. That primary phenomenon being the broader and intimidating digital transition besetting the newspaper industry.

I really care about the fate of our industry’s Artists, so let’s not get distracted by the familiar or overly valorize what we're comfortable with, because this year the great shakedown has begun in earnest.